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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Peter Bossman becomes Eastern Europe's first black mayor

Peter Bossman and some of his supporters celebrate
his victory in the Slovenian Adriatic town of Piran yesterday.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
A Ghana-born doctor nicknamed "the Obama of Piran" became the first
black mayor in eastern Europe yesterday after he was elected in Piran,
south-western Slovenia.

Peter
Bossman, 54, said he was "happy and proud" to have been elected to the
post after winning a second round runoff in the town with just over half
the votes.

Bossman settled in Slovenia, then still part of
Yugoslavia, in the 1970s after arriving in the country to study
medicine. He decided to stay after marrying a fellow student from
Croatia.

Speaking about his campaign, in which he said he would
introduce electric cars to the town, Bossman said: "I based my campaign
on a dialogue, and I think the dialogue has won."

But Bossman was
criticised during the campaign for not speaking fluent Slovene, the
country's official language, prompting him to say in an interview with
Delo, one of Slovenia's leading newspapers, that a friend and professor
of Slovenian had "offered to give me additional lessons".

However
the new mayor, who runs his own private medical practice and is a member
of Slovenia's governing centre-left Social Democrat party, said he had
not suffered racial discrimination.

"In the first months after
coming to Slovenia I felt that some people did not want to be with us
[African immigrants]. But for the last 10 or 15 years … I have no
problems at all and I think people no longer see the colour of my skin
when they look at me," he said.

Slovenia has a population of
around 2 million, the majority of whom are native Slovene, and
immigration is more common from ex-Yugoslavian countries such as Bosnia
and Herzegovina and Serbia. There are very few black people living
there. The town of Piran, which lies on the Gulf of Piran on the
Adriatic Sea, has a population of around 17,000.

Vlado Miheljak, a
political analyst, said the vote in Piran was a test of whether
Slovenia was "mature enough to elect a non-white political
representative."

SCLC TODAY

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